Mac – Need help setting up a script to change date and time Mac OS Catalina

applescriptautomatorcatalinamacterminal

hoping someone can help with this. I am trying to write an automator terminal script in Mac OS Catalina that will turn off WiFi, turn off automatic date and time settings, and set my mac to a specific system date and time. I have really no programming experience but what I have so far works to turn off wifi and change the system date and time…but the script will not exit in automator…it just keeps spinning. Not sure how to get the Sudo -S command to exit once it sets the system date and time. Here's what I have so far:

networksetup -setairportpower en0 off

echo "password" | sudo -S date 0101000120

So this will turn off wifi, and will pass my password (can also do it through a dialog but thats not my problem) and will set the system date…then the automator wheel just spins….

Any ideas how to get the terminal script to exit and move on to the next command…or should I just run it and then quit the script as its spinning which isn't ideal but also works
command to turn on and off auto updating of mac system date and time?

Thanks so much for reading and greatly appreciate any help.

EDIT: Currently re-wrote the automator task to run the terminal command, ask for a password then pass that on:

networksetup -setairportpower en0 off
pw="$(osascript -e 'Tell application "System Events" to display dialog "Password:" default answer "" with hidden answer' -e 'text returned of result' 2>/dev/null)" && / echo "$pw" | sudo -S date 0101000120

Still spins the wheel in an infinite loop at the end but I can click it and force stop. Anyone knows a way to just get it to stop appreciate it!

Best Answer

I could get this to work by piping the password to sudo from a file instead of using echo:

sudo -S date 0101000120 < ~/passwd.txt

I'm not sure what security implications this has though, but it feels wrong ...

If you're after a quick and dirty solution then this will do it, however as per nohillside's comment, here are some instructions to run sudo commands without requiring a password. These suggestions work for me on Mojave in iTerm2 and terminal.

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Mac – Need help understanding script running at startup? “osascript -e ‘tell app \”ARDAgent\“ to do shell script \”say quack\“’”

It seems your Mac has been compromised (at the time of your writing) in order to mine bitcoins (./bitcoin-qt.app) probably by using ARDAgent exploit or similar. The posted commands are quite advanced, however plenty of them are copy&paste commands which indicates some pseudo-hacker (with actually little knowledge) who is trying to install trojan on your system.

Find the explanation for history commands below:

1: It removing files from Trash. Maybe clearing some evidence after downloading something.
2-12: Accessing Downloads folder with a bit of trouble. Half of these commands are mis-typed, so maybe the person was in hurry or stressed out.
13-14: Finding all files which belong to an unknown user (for unknown reason).
15-20: Struggling to access your passwords in KeyChains, but most of the commands are mis-typed. This indicates very little knowledge how to use the basic shell commands. It seems he tries to access folders such as /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/Automator, /Library/Keychains, but fails.
21: There is no command sha.
22-23: Struggling to see your processes.
24-29: Struggling to check all the system users, however present shell prompt in 25-27 indicates that these commands were copy and pasted from some hack tutorial.
34-39: Checking network configuration.
41: Disabling auto updates for Google apps.
40, 45: Log-in to remote host.
47: Checking your non-Apple kernel extensions.
48-49: Checking your non-Apple loaded jobs. Repeating the same command without sudo could indicate that the user didn't have root access.
51: Checking startup items.
57: Disabling remote desktop agent. Why?
71-72: How he managed to install htop using apt-get on OS X? I don't know.
73-164: Checking processes, what's listening on port 80 and the history of last logins.
165-225: Checking your users and files again.
228: Indicates the person is from Windows background, as the parameter /i is invalid.
226-237: Repeating the same things over and over again.
238-480: Clearing DNS caches.
241-259: Running Bitcoin client.
263-264: Pasting code into wrong window. It should be actually:
```
osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "say quack"'
```
Which basically on successful run of ARDAgent would run command say quack which basically say loudly "quack". This suppose to test if ARDAgent is vulnerable to the attacks, but testing by using Speech Synthesis it's the worse what hacker can do, because the user will hear that and figure it out that something is wrong.
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Your action were correct by disabling SUID for ARDAgent. When you run Disk Utility and Repair Permission, it will automatically restore the right permissions (including ARDAgent), unless it has been modified. The other thing it to keep your system up-to-date and monitor logs and history more frequently.

Passing a password to an Automator application

AppleScript should let you do this by using with administrator privileges:

osascript -e 'do shell script "sudo -s launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist" with administrator privileges'

This doesn't pass the password, but prompts for it with a standard OS X prompt:

You can use this in your Automator workflow in one of the two following ways:

Best Answer

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Passing a password to an Automator application

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